As part of PKP’s ongoing work to advance access to high quality research, Managing Director Brian Owen recently participated in a meeting of the Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group. The Group includes stakeholder representatives from libraries, journals, presses, researchers, funding agencies, and publishing service providers coming together to explore opportunities for supporting Canadian scholarly publishing.

The CALJ Annual Boot Camp is fast approaching. This year, attendees will hear from experts in social media, strategic planning, metadata, identifiers and more. Don’t miss this great opportunity for professional development and to network with your colleagues.

Mark your calendars! We’re very pleased to announce that the PKP 2017 International Scholarly Publishing Conference will be held in Montreal, Quebec on August 2, 3, and 4, 2017. The conference will co-hosted by our friends at Érudit, and will take place at the Université de Montréal. Montreal is Canada’s second largest city and has a major international airport making travel easy from most locations.

The PKP Fall 2016 Sprint was held on October 2nd and 3rd at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. As with all PKP sprints, community members joined us from across Canada and other countries – most in-person but with some remote participation. Thanks to everyone who contributed their time and expertise to make our software better for everyone.

As a community-based, not-for-profit research and software development project, we are frequently asked the question, “how can I get involved with PKP?” If that’s something you’ve been wondering about too, here are some possible answers.

PKP is currently assessing the future development of Open Conference Systems (OCS). Our focus on Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP) has resulted in less development for OCS over the past few years. We are now deciding whether to return to enhancing OCS, to continue keeping it “on hold”, or to step away from any future development completely.

The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) has recently released a new guide to best practices in licensing and attribution for scholarly publishers. The guide provides a valuable overview of the importance of licensing policies for your publishing activities, making use of Creative Commons licenses, thinking about open data, and more.

The PKP Index is growing rapidly and now contains over 170,000 items from more than 500 different sources. Using PKP’s Open Harvester System (OHS) software, the PKP Index is open to all journals, proceedings, or monographs using OJS, OCS, or OMP.

If you were unable to attend the PKP AGM, or wanted to review some of it, we have made the recording available here. Highlights include a demonstration of OJS 3.0, an early look at our new Open Typesetting Stack (OTS – still in development), updates on our research projects, and a review of the past year’s activities.

PKP is very pleased to be part of the recently announced Canadian cyberinfrastructure for humanities and social sciences research grant awarded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).  This was a very competitive program and it is gratifying to see strong support for an initiative with its roots in scholarly publishing and strong connections to the Canadian humanities and social sciences sector.

In case you missed it, two new documents are available to help you quickly learn how to use OJS. Learning OJS 2.4.8 covers the latest version of the 2.x line, and Learning OJS 3.0 covers the first version of new OJS 3.x line. Both are full of screenshots and step-by-step instructions for using the software. These are first drafts of the documentation and are being reviewed and expanded by the PKP Documentation Interest Group.